Sorry, Malcolm. Your explanation doesn’t apply to the most striking outlier in corporate America. Jobs’ greatest assets—his charismatic personality, his impossible standards, his uncanny sense of what customers want—have nothing to do with timing or training. We can understand how Gates rose to the top through 10,000 hours of wonky coding, but what was the equivalent for Jobs? At various times, he’s attributed his success to an eclectic range of experiences, including a pilgrimage to India, his experimentation with LSD, and a college course in calligraphy. And where does his chutzpah come from? Plenty of people grew up in Silicon Valley, but only a teenage Jobs had the stones to ask HP’s Bill Hewlett to give him some free parts.

As co-founder of Apple, Jobs was an instrumental force behind two game-changing products: the Apple II, the first truly popular personal computer, and the Macintosh, which established how people use computers to this day. Then, as CEO of Pixar, Jobs launched a digital movie studio; his $10 million investment grew into a bookshelf jammed with Oscars and a $7.4 billion buyout from Disney.

But Jobs’ most impressive work came after his 1996 return to Apple. He raised the company from the dead through canny management—streamlining the product line, emphasizing design, and figuring out how Apple’s software could serve consumers better than his competitors’ could. Then came two more game changers: the iPod and the iPhone.

That makes five astonishing achievements, any one of which would qualify as a career capstone for your ordinary outlier. Now the focus turns to a potential sixth milestone. There will be a day—who knows when—when Jobs is no longer at the helm of Apple.

If he can leave the company with his values so deeply baked in that its innovation and panache can continue, it would be a crowning ­achievement in a career already without parallel. But we still won’t have a clue about why Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs.